Newsletter Nr. 16 (December 2010, subsequent to our 16th Annual Conference, our 2010 NY Workshop)
Compiled by Evelin Lindner, in NY, USA, and Germany, Europe (December, 2010)
(Note: This newsletter is written in American English, since this conference took place in the U.S. In our outside-of-the-U.S. workshops, we often use British English.)
Contents
• Pictures
• Thanks!
• Announcements
• What Is the Aim of Our Work?
• World Dignity University
• Messages from You
• Welcome Again!
Pictures
(Important note to our conference particants: During our conferences, we always make an effort to ask for your permission to have your pictures posted on this website. However, you may have overheard or misunderstood our question, or you may have changed your mind since, either in total or for specific pictures/videos, please let us know! Thank you! Since we wish to walk the talk of dignity, it is very important for us to do our utmost in respecting everybody's privacy. We do not wish to gather written permissions from you during our conferences, since we value the building of mutual trust in relationships, and we would like to refrain from contributing to an ever more bureaucratic and legalistic society. Again, thank you so much for kindly holding hands with us in respectful mutuality in this matter!)
| The pictures come in four main webgalleries: |
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Morton Deutsch is the honorary convener of our workshops. He is the founder of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR), our host at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City. In 2009, we celebrated his influential, important, and eminent life and life-work with the first life-time award of the HumanDHS network. Please click on the picture above to see it larger. |
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| Pictures of all of Day One of the workshop, Thursday, December 9, 2010. |
| Round Table 1 on
Day One of our workshop, Thursday, December 9, 2010. • Please click on the pictures on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. • Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Van Billings Harris's camera. |
| Public Event on
Day One of our workshop, Thursday, December 9, 2010. In the spirit of our motto of Unity in Diversity, we opened the evening with music from Iran, by Aida Shahghasemi, and closed with Fred Ellis's children from many cultural backgrounds. • Please click on the picture on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. • Please click on the picture on the right here to see more photos from Van Billings Harris's camera. |
| Pictures of all of
Day Two of our workshop, Friday, December 10, 2010. • Please click on the picture or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. • Please click here to see more photos from Van Billings Harris's camera. |
Michael Britton gave the Don Klein Memorial Lecture on
Day Two of our workshop, Friday, December 10, 2010. Michael uses Don's metaphor of a scrim, a transparent stage curtain, where one believes that what one sees is reality only as long as the light shines on it in a certain way: see Don's explanation. • Please click on the picture on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. • Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Van Billings Harris's camera. |
Round Table 2 on
Day Two of our workshop, Friday, December 10, 2010. |
Anne and Bertram Wyatt-Brown received the HumanDHS Life Time Award on Friday, December 10, 2010, on Day Two of the 2010 Workshop of Humiliation and Violent Conflict! • Please click on the picture on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. • Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Van Billings Harris's camera. |
| Round Table 3 on
Day Two of our workshop, Friday, December 10, 2010. • Please click on the picture on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. • Please click here to see more photos from Van Billings Harris's camera. |
Closing our workshop on Friday, December 10, 2010: • Please click on the picture on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. • Please click here to see more photos from Van Billings Harris's camera. |
December 8, 2010 pre-workshop meeting:
We were kindly invited to the Conflict Resolution End of Year Holiday Party, sponsored by the Advanced Consortium for Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4) and supported by The Masters Program in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University, the Center for International Conflict Resolution at SIPA (CICR) and the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College (ICCCR). We thank Peter T. Coleman for making our annual Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict possible. Please click on the pictures above or here to see more photos. |
December 11, 2010, first post-workshop meeting. Please click on the pictures above or here to see more photos. |
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December 12, 2010, second post-workshop meeting with Tomoko Ishii and her son. Please click on the picture above to see it larger. |
Dear Friends!
We had a wonderful workshop in NY! It was titled:
2010 Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict
(representing the Sixteenth Annual HumanDHS Conference)!
Thanks!
Anne and Bertram Wyatt-Brown received the HumanDHS Life Time Award on Friday, December 10, 2010, on Day Two of the 2010 Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict! Let us celebrate them and their extraordinary life-work, and express our gratitude to them for their invaluable continuous support to our HumanDHS initiative!
Please let us continue by sharing with you our deep gratitude to Linda Hartling. Without her wisdom, love, care, and huge investment of time since 1999, when we met via email, and then, in full intensity, since our first conference in 2003, our network and our conferences would not be there.
Please welcome and celebrate Linda’s leadership! In November 2008, Linda relinquished her administrative responsibilities at Wellesley College to devote more time in service of HumanDHS and she is our new HumanDHS Director! (Evelin remains the HumanDHS Founding President). A big welcome to you, dearest Linda!
Rick and Linda moved across the North American Continent and found a physical home for the Pacific Rim Branch of HumanDHS and the first HumanDHS Dialogue Home in Portland, Oregon. Everyone is invited to visit! And please send all of your relevant books to be included in the HumanDHS library!
May Linda and I express our sincere gratitude and appreciation now to all of you who co-created our 2010 Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict representing the Sixteenth Annual HumanDHS Conference! You ALL made our workshop a unique and extremely exiting experience! Many said afterwards that it was, as all our workshops and conferences, extremely intense, stimulating, and nurturing, however, that this workshop was of particularly high quality in all these aspects!
Our workshops are closed conferences, only upon invitation. We could have had many more participants and unfortunately had to say "no" to many of you who wrote to us and wished to participate. We would like to express our regret to all of you who did not have the opportunity to participate. We will try to broaden our activities (and resources!) in the future! Please bear with us and give us your support so that we can grow in constructive ways!
Now we would like to thank Morton Deutsch, our honorary convener, and Peter T. Coleman, Founder and Director of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) at Columbia University and their wonderful team, together with our other generous host Jean-Marie Guéhenno, who is the successor of Aldo Civico, and Andrea Bartoli as Director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR), and member of the Columbia University Conflict Resolution Network (CU-CRN), now AC4. Particularly loving thanks go to Juliette de Wolfe, whose wonderful support with reserving the room went beyond all expectations! We also wish to give special thanks to Beth Fisher-Yoshida, Academic Director of the Master of Science Program in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the School of Continuing Education at Columbia University. Furthermore, we wish to thank Judit Révész. We were able to build on the work she did for our first workshop in 2004, and without her continous support throughout all the years since 2001, our work would not be possible. She untiringly guards our Contact page!
Please let us furthermore express special thanks to Rick Slaven, Tonya Hammer, Michael Britton, and Mariana Vergara, as well as Adriano Sverko and Van Billings Harris, who so wonderfully helped to keep our workshop in shape, and with documenting the entire conference. Tonya Hammer kindly took charge of registration and, together with Rick Slaven, of our finances. Thank you, dear Tonya and Rick! We are overwhelmed by the generous support that was extended by the participants of the workshop and would like to express our deep gratitude! Russell Daisey, wonderful musician and composer, kindly invited into spontaneous music throughout the workshop - we are very touched by your gift!
Our special thanks, as always, to Linda M. Hartling for setting the frame of appreciative inquiry in and Donald Klein's spirit. Our warmest thanks furthermore to our moderators Michael Britton & Ariel Lublin, Beth Fisher-Yoshida & Emanuela Del Re, Philip Brown & Stephanie Heuer!
May we end by thanking our presenters for their inspiration at our Public Event on the afternoon of Thursday, December 10. Aida Shahghasemi presented Iranian music, and Fred Ellis came with his pupils!
Finally, Michael Britton moved us all deeply on Friday morning in his Don Klein Memorial Lecture for Don's originally planned lecture The Humiliation Dynamic: Looking Back... Looking Forward. Don showed us how to live in awe and wonderment. We will always need your wisdom, dear Don!
A very very warm thank-you to all!
Evelin & Linda, on behalf of our entire network.
Announcements
Announcement of our Latest News!
What Is the Aim of Our Work?
Please read more in newsletter12.
Our World Dignity University
HumanDHS is primarily grounded in academic work. We are independent of any religious or political agenda. However, we wish to bring academic work into "real life." Our research focuses on topics such as dignity (with humiliation as its violation), or, more precisely, on respect for equal dignity for all human beings in the world. This is not only our research topic, but also our core value, in line with Article 1 of the Human Rights Declaration that states that every human being is born with equal dignity (that ought not be humiliated). We agree with Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, who advocates the building of bridges from academia as follows, "I have always believed that good scholarship can be relevant and consequential for public policy. It is possible to affect public policy without being an advocate; to be passionate about peace without losing analytical rigor; to be moved by what is just while conceding that no one has a monopoly on justice." We would like to add that we believe that good scholarship can be relevant and consequential not only for public policy, but for raising awareness in general.
The World Dignity University initiative is strongly committed to:
• making sure the development of the WDU is globally inclusive
• avoiding duplication of the achievements of others who have already worked with similar issues.
Rather than competing with existing institutions, our goal is to join hands in the spirit of mutual respect and equality in dignity to create something much more powerful than what we would accomplish if we worked independently. We already have connections with highly regarded academic institutions through our network of scholars on our Global Advisory Board.
• respecting unity in diversity: The views expressed on this website, as in any of the HumanDHS publications, do not represent any official HumanDHS position. All HumanDHS publications present the views and research findings of the individual researchers, educators, and authors, with the aim of promoting the development of ideas and discussion about major concerns of human dignity and humiliation studies and related fields.
• diverse online courses/seminars/talks/workshops will be shaped by the members of our various teams and boards, particularly our Education Team members, with their diverse expertise and approaches, supplemented with face-to-face gatherings, for example, at our annual meetings.
Please see:
• The Pdf file of the description of the World Dignity University initiative.
• "Humiliation in the Academic Setting": A Special Symposium Issue
Messages from YOU
(with the authors' permission, listed chronologically)
Dear participant in our workshop! You contributed to bringing dignity and love into our workshop, and due to your presence, it was an unforgettable experience! Your contributions spoke to the need to begin with ourselves if we are serious about bringing more dignity into the world. The motto of unity in diversity offers itself as path toward dignity, and we would therefore like to invite you to send us your reflections in connection with our workshop. We will place them here, just below this paragraph, so that we all can see the diversity of impressions that emerged, and the diversity of ways in which we touched each other. Thank YOU!
Linda & Evelin, notes from our conversations during and after our workshop (posted December 12, 2010, by Evelin):
Linda and I, we were deeply touched by the integrity and humanity that manifested in this workshop through the voices of all of us. In a deeply sincere way, a broad range was touched upon, from extending a helping hand in stark and sudden disasters as in Haiti, to unmasking the disasters that have become part of our "normal" lives through the way we are complicit in a world in which abuse and exploitation are also systemic. Particularly the latter is difficult to speak about, since tacit complicity, when unmasked, can amount to humiliation and trigger angry backlashes. It is so much easier to reject what is "bad" in others, or help the needy, than face our own shadows, as Carol Smaldino might formulate it.
Throughout our work, Linda and I, we have made a continuous effort to clarify that the appreciative approach that we use is designed to help us face our shadows, rather than papering over them. We believe that a space of mutual trust and caring respect must be created first, in order to enable us to help each other to acknowledge that we may, wittingly or unwittingly, partake in the perpetration of abuse, particularly in systemic abuse whose nature is often difficult to understand. And that we may not only be bystanders or victims, but also perpetrators, at a personal level, and at an interpersonal and intergroup level, from micro to meso and macro, locally and globally.
Vice versa, as much as we may overlook our own part in perpetration, we may also overlook the strength of victims, even of the most humiliated among them. The strength that can flow from victimhood, even of utter humiliation, has been cast into iconic images of, for example, Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela.
Linda and I, we are profoundly thankful to the participants in this workshop for shedding light on the nuances and depths, the conundrums, that are at the core of the experience of dignity and humiliation.From Evelin (December 17, 2010):
Please see our Appreciative Nurturing text. I added "A Hands-on Guideline for Organizing Workshops and Conferences" section, as follows:
Our HumanDHS workshops and conferences are being organized using appreciative emailing. The point is to invite people from our heart and soul, as human beings among human beings who share the same lifetime on our planet.
From 2003 to 2010, I was the main person to invite people into our workshops and conferences. My aim was to establish a new reality of how to organize meetings.
My conclusion, in 2010, is that our main focus must be to communicate to the participants of our conferences that I, as the person who invites, and we, as associates of the HumanDHS network, are not neutral to our invitees' participation, but that we personally place the highest value on their presence.
We need to model our emphasis on relationships and our appreciation of the participants' presence. We need to refrain from inviting people into being “presenters” and “audiences,” but invite people, during our workshop and afterwards, to weave a web of mutual I-Thou connections (Martin Buber) grounded in respect for equal dignity. Being is more important than Having (Erich Fromm) or Performing roles.
It is not enough for us to theoretically see the human species as a global family, we need to get practical in our conferences and workshops. We need to model that we, rather than regarding people as separated and isolated individuals, wish to invite them to move closer to each other and practice with a wider group of people the kind of family-like solidarity that usually is reserved for family and friends.
Since Western culture emphasizes the concept of the isolated individual, it requires a lot of pro-active convincing from our side to make this message be heard, particularly in Westernized cultural realms. It is therefore not enough, from our side, to wait that others will understand our point. We need to make the first step and communicate how much value we place in the relationship with the other. We cannot have our theoretical ideals and values be the only "attractors" for our work, including our conferences, we must also invest ourselves, as human beings, with our heart and soul, and make clear how much we value the relationship with the other.
From my point of view, this latter "requirement" for our work is the hardest. People are not used to invest themselves as human beings, we are all socialized into filling roles, acting from roles, hiding behind "safe" facades that separate us, and putting on stage performances rather than ourselves. Our HumanDHS approach means saying: "I personally will be happy to see you at our workshop” rather than "you are welcome to participate (and for me it is not important whether you come or not)."
This is also why I try to congratulate our network associates to their birthdays if possible, because it underlines that I personally value her or him as a person. Businesses have long recognized that this is the best strategy to keep customers, and consultants teach this approach in their seminars, namely that people need to be seen, feel valued and wanted.
In our case, we must make clear that we are not a business or a cult that wishes to manipulate people’s need to belong and be recognized for profit maximization, but that we authentically appreciate our workshop participants and network associates.
The organizers of our conferences must be authentic appreciation agents. To say it in the context of my theoretical work, it means replacing the old language of honor with a new language of appreciation, framed by respect for equality in dignity. No longer status and competition, no longer war and fighting, but a new language that stays clear of the linguistics of the past and works for connectivity, mutuality, and equality in dignity.
As in all our activities, we follow a growth paradigm. Like with the Open Space approch ("the people who come, are always the right people"), we invite people from our heart and soul to become associates of our network, participate in our conferences, or join the faculty of our upcoming World Dignity University. The classical approach is to start with themes and projects and then find the people to fill the slots. We turn this approach upside down. We begin with the people and invite them to contribute with what they feel for and what they authentically stand for. This serves our core principle of Unity in Diversity by nurturing the best of diversity within our overall unifying ideal of mutuality and equality in dignity. Authentically standing for something is always more dignified and has more impact than filling a slot defined by others. It is extremely important to note that this approach entails drawbacks that more or less are unavoidable if one does not wish to dilute this approach to much: there will always be topics that will not be covered and needs not served by this approach. The solution will be to invite those who feel a lack, to step forward and contribute next time. Thus, we allow organic growth to emerge.
We will develop our World Dignity University similarly. We will invite people to offer a lecture, a seminar, or whatever they feel they can contribute with. In that way, also our curriculum will grow like a tree.
Both Linda and I, and all our network associates, we plan our cooperation for our work/network to last throughout our lifetimes, and therefore we think very long-term. We wish to gather people in our network who walk the talk. Many people in the world are very intelligent and diligent, and hard-working and prolific. However, few have the sensitivity for humility, for walking the talk, for the significance or dignity (with humiliation as its violation), and all issues that are related. This sensitivity is like a foreign language that some people speak and others not. We look for people who embody the being-in-this-world that gives rise to this language, and this is what is most important for us, more important than any "tangible product" be it time-wise or otherwise. Therefore it is not important if a persons feel she may not have enough time just now. What is so valuable for us is her sensitivity, her speaking this foreign language. It is a language that people do not learn usually, only some people seem to know it intuitively, perhaps through particularly educative or even harsh life experiences.
Through our work, we wish to spell out in more depth what this new language of dignity is all about, of which, so far, so few people have an inkling. And we ourselves, me included, of course, we are also only learners. The point is to work for something new, rather than against something old. We are aware that focusing energy on being confrontational and busily shaming people into admitting their failings to see their own participation in, or at least their blindness for the practices of rankism (racism, sexism, etc., see Robert Fuller), creates backlashes of humiliation and saps energy, which, as a result, rather then speeding it up, slows down the necessary transformation toward something new. On the other side, we make utterly clear that we are not complicit with macro aggressions nor micro aggressions (that, in replacing macro aggressions turn into ever more covert and hideous tools of humiliation). Basically, the economic system, in which we all partake, to our view, is a huge systemic macro and micro aggression that victimizes all of us, the poor first, but even affecting the rich and wealthy in the long run, around the entire world, including our ecosphere. When I travel around the world, the suffering I see that flows from the supposed "realities" of our global economic system, is currently perhaps the most potent and covert manifestation of humiliation. And, it is far from being an unavoidable "reality." It is a human-made system of destruction-by-design that can and ought to be replaced with a more constructive and sustainable systemic frame as soon as possible. See our article in progress.
We attempt to use our own sense of victimhood to invite everybody to join hands for creating a new future, where we can, together, appraise in much more clarity and depth both the perpetration and the victimization we partake in. Or, to say it differently, we wish to avoid what Jimmy Jones calls "the post victim ethical exemption syndrome." Not everybody is mature enough to embark on this path of "active nonremembering" (Volf, 1996) and of avoiding humiliating-potential-humiliators-entrepreneurship. Taking the time to remember the past (i.e. its grievances, humiliation), and choosing to forgive and purposively embracing "the other" in an act of mutual transformation, is difficult.
If you feel you can embark on this difficult path of ours together with us, WELCOME!
Most fondly, sending you my deep respect and admiration,
EvelinFrom Adriano Sverko , reflections (January 3, 2010):
I am grateful to the small chain of coincidences that brought me to HDHS. I remember wanting to share that I had dropped out of my graduate degree program in media studies, in the early 1990s, because there was not much room for my own inquiry in the direction I had to grow in. I had learned, in various ways, that change can only happen if I change within. I also learned that the real magic happens when you ask "what do you think," but most of academia, even in sociological and psychological work, looked for the external measurables. And credence was not given to the growing evidence that the observer affects the observed.
And here we are with a conference that DOES think from such viewpoints. A new age of inquiry and science is here, and i am looking forward to it.
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HUM
I want to remind everyone of Mariana Vergara's statement about the prefix of the word "humiliation"... how in the debasement is also the ultimate cleansing and revitalization that comes with the pain. It is no wonder, then, that many people who grew up in horribly challenging conditions as children find themselves supporting and reaching out to children in the generation that follows.
I want to also point out that the cabalistic reading of the old testament has the Jews in difficult predicaments, several times, in EGYPT. Symbolically, cabalistic scholars claim, this use of the word Egypt is symbolic for the process of being brought back down -- face to the dirt -- and having to build up new character within ourselves, again, and new awareness.
I look forward to talking to Adenrele Awotona, one of the attendees. It became so clear how their modern low-footprint designs take a city or region out of a time of chaos and havoc and help them to leap-frog into an innovative future. It is putting what Mariana mentioned into large-scale mobilization. I plan to talk more to him to see how we can collaborate in the areas of renewable energy and sustainable development.
And just for fun, did anyone know that the smallest official city in the world is called Hum?
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NEEDS
During my time away from "officiated learning," that is, in a university system, I have removed some "needs" that I thought I needed, giving rise to new lumps of time and sometimes money, for the work I have set out to manage and complete in my lifetime. Part of my work, now, is to inspire others to see what they can do away with so that they have more time to transform society.
And, with that, I wish to remind you all to put in reflections. I am sure there are things that you will say that you thought about during the conference or after it, that will inspire me further. The more we reflect and share the more we move out of the noosphere and into action. Not having time to is what keeps us in the current paradigm of poverty. Making time for relations to build will create the new paradigm and new solutions.
One woman recently wrote about a vision wherein her grandmother consoled her in a vision: "Granddaughter, you must start with the seed of it all, and the seed of it all is about relations. If you will start there, everything else will unfold naturally, don't you worry" (from www.kalliopeia.org/emergence_Grandmothers.html).
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2nd Stage of Collision (and new humiliations?)
I have been thinking: OK, so we are in a tussle. Global warming. Gulf stream disruption. Peak oil. That is an area that I wish to contribute to. "How i can do more [sic]?"
I am thinking of James O'Dea (formerly of the Institute of Noetic Science). I believe, as he does, that I am so often guilty by implication. What is my tax money used for? What does it support? What do I do to shape how it is spent? When do I disagree?
Why do I sometimes comment about those styrofoam cups at a deli or business conference, but sometimes I do not? And when do I do more good, when I say something and maybe get perceived as "judgmental" or when I represent the children that have not yet been born by trying to stop styrofoam? Its so difficult to say.
Sounding silly?
Well, how about this? As the 2nd stage of "collision" is happening (the first wave was when humankind lost its land frontiers), you might notice that only 2 or 3 years ago, a simple 2-word-search in a google or yahoo engine was able to get, on your first page, research and inquiry results. Today, due to bots and marketing expertise, it is becoming a chore to get to good content.
Today, Wikipedia (though social networking pundits have stats claiming it is as accurate as the Encylopedia Britannica) is being disallowed in the CUNY University System as a legitimately acceptable reference.
The children. We talk to them in schools and at the kitchen table. They swim from Nintendo DS to iPods for games, to MP3 players with headphones, to X-box to Facebook to texting on the cell phone. And so do we. But they do it more so it is wrong. Do we have any stats? Are children losing presence? Or, are they building a new consciousness where they can swim through discourses faster? If anyone has thoughts on this, I would be grateful.
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Pyramid of Power and Plastic
As an environmentalist, I am interested in ideas.
The companies that control companies that control banks that control companies. That is to say, the top of the pyramid, in many national economies, are the raw materials extractors. The mining companies. The BPs and the Exxon-Mobils; King coal and rare metals for weapons manufacturing.
We need a new era wherein the top of the pyramid becomes something else. People who have wisdom? People who have knowledge? Or maybe, ways of thinking that don't create anything.
I try to explain this idea with regards to weight loss programs. Most trainers who become wealthy, sell 3 things: a book, a DVD or videotape, and a piece of plastic. The piece of plastic has the greatest profit margin. It will be a cup that helps you do a push up in a new way. It will be a gummi rope that helps you tighten some important muscles in a new way.
But where is the real value of a trainer? It is the trainer's know-how. BUT, we don't know how to price the know-how, we only know how to price plastic.
So, I think that part of many of our conversations need to come to pricing. How can people sell things or make a livelihood and simply make LESS THINGS??
Thanks for reading,
adriano sverko
www.asvmproductions.com
Welcome Again!
We would like to end this newsletter by thanking you again for all the wonderful mutual support. You contributed sogenerously, therefore let us give our warmest thanks to ALL OF US! We very much look forward to our upcoming two conferences in 2011!
Please be warmly invited to our next HumanDHS conference in Dunedin, New Zealand, in August 2010!
Linda & Evelin, December 2010
2003 – present, Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies
